User Contributed Notes 7 notes

Be aware that pg_fetch_all() is subject to the same limitations as pg_fetch_assoc(), in that if your query returns multiple columns with the same name (or alias) then only the rightmost one will be returned in the associative array, other ones will not.

A simple example:<?php$res = pg_query("SELECT a.*, b.* -- Fetch all columns from both tablesFROM table1 AS a

LEFT OUTER JOIN table2 as bUSING (column)");

$rows = pg_fetch_all($res);?>

In this example, since we're selecting columns via *, if any columns from table2 share the same names as those in table1, they will be the ones returned despite that table2 (as the optional side of an outer join) may return NULL values.

This is not a bug, just a limitation of associative arrays in general, and is easy enough to avoid by structuring your queries carefully and using column aliases to avoid confusion.

For those wondering, this function returns a two-dimentional array, the first dimension being a 0-based indexed array, the second dimension an associative. So you might access the first authors surname using $authors[0]["surname"].

Certainly this is the case in PHP 5.2.9, I can't vouch for other versions though.

Also for those who are trying to move off oracle, pg_fetch_all returns an array with rows and columns inverted in the sense of ocifetchall. You would need to transpose this result array before your code takes the first index a column name and the second index a row index.

pg_fetch_all, despite the app note, accepts only one argument, the resultset. It does exactly what is expected, returning a two-dimensional array of the resultset. I suspect the app note given was just copied from pg_fetch_array, which is what you want to use for a single row.